1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a mechanism-design support method, system and program for presenting job content to an operator who performs the mechanism design of a specific version of a product, and guiding or navigating the operator in various manners.
2. Prior Art
Heretofore, in designing a new product, the mechanisms of the product have been designed by determining various parameters, such as physical shapes, dimensions, required components and the positional relationship between the components, on a trial-and-error basis. Therefore, one design engineer can acquire techniques for designing within a short period of time while maintaining a standard or higher level of design quality only after the design engineer designs a product family belonging to the same category over and over again. While such repeated experience in design of a product family belonging to the same category allows design engineers to familiarize themselves with the design of the product family and acquire design knowhow individually, the knowhow is generally accumulated only in the individual design engineer, and hardly shared between other design engineers.
Under a situation where the demands of product purchasers become diversified, and a large-item small-scale production is generalized, it is required to continuously bring various versions of one product to the market within a short period of time even if the product versions fall into the same category, which leads to a strong need for drastically reducing the period required for designing each of the versions. Thus, in a variety of product design fields, it becomes critical to allow even inexperienced design engineers to design various versions at a standard or higher level of quality within a short period of time.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a technology capable of complying with such needs.